Profile: Alex Cunningham

Personal background
I'm in college to be a high school English teacher and writer, which is why in my free time I teach astronomy, ecology, zoology, and environmental science to kids at the the EcoTarium in Worcester, MA (www.ecotarium.org). At the museum, our resident astronomer is a longtime SETI@home supporter, and it was about time I became one, as well. So many kids have never stopped to luck up over their heads at night, through the haze, through away from the light pollution, let alone with a telescope. We get a lot of them who don't want to try and remember the constellations and asterisms. They often see it as something external, forced on them by Grown-Ups. So we teach them that humans used their imaginations to make constellations, and their ingenuity to discover the enormity of the universe. SETI@home is an example of the boundlessness of human effort, not the restrictiveness of group identity. If I'm going to teach it, I must also do it.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
What makes people give up their computing power to work for a non-profit organization in another place? Why do we pay higher electric bills for the privilege of helping SETI do its work? Perhaps because each one of us wants the glory of being the one to help discover something unique. Maybe it's all a fight for notoriety. Maybe even it's an excuse to surf the internet a bit longer while puttin off work. But I think it is because our imaginations are tickled pink at the thought of making a connection - any connection, to any one or any thing - and SETI@home is the locus for so many of these. We connect with each other, sharing computational power. We connect with something bigger than ourselves, an organization that relies on us, lets us feel needed. And most importantly, we might just connect with something outside all that we yet know, and brings us closer not just to each other, but to the very ultimate _other_.
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.